💿✨The Nexialist #0147

the beauty of degraded media | ab.solve | heaven knows | la_original.mp3 | speak-o-phone | oralitura | ai pin | best inventions of 2023 | future creatives report | life trends 2024

Nov 16, 2023

welcome to another fresh batch of curated links from beyond, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this e-mail finds y̴̡̟̬̫̾̓͗͒͝o̷̡̱͗͗̌̅̀͝ú̴̥͐͌͝ ̸͍̗͕̹̠̝̓͆w̸̯̻͔̺̍̓̓ë̶̻̦̹͕͉́̃ḽ̷͍́͘̕l̷̞̽̈́̈́̎.̸̡̼̈́̀͐̊͜ this week i am writing to you from beautiful lisbon, where i’m eating very well, taking some sun and mainly covering the web summit (more on that next week) together with the teams of envisioning and cappra institute for sebrae-rs. because i wanted to focus on the event, i started crafting this nexialist before the usual time to distribute my brainsparks evenly across the week. i’ll leave you to it, because this week, my brain needs some care to absorb all the ideas and make sense of it. enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🎞️the beauty of degraded media

(via messynessychic) this video essay by polyphonic is full of treasures and brainsparks. the vinyl crackle, the muffled recordings, the glitches on vhs, for some we are drawn to these things. “why do we gravitate to the flaws that we’ve spent more than a century trying to remove from our media?”

it is quite an investigation: in the current aesthetic flawlessness of media emerges a desire and perceived aesthetic value for exactly those flaws we once had. it’s about temporality, intimacy, the (im)materiality of media, a post-digital symptom. he even compares it to the ancient Japanese art form, kintsugi, where a pot’s crack is celebrated by mending it with gold.

the video was done four years ago, so before all the ai-generated perfection (and the glitches that come with it), so it’s interesting to think of how we’ll look back years from now to all the glitches from ai but also how its perfection might makes us crave even more imperfection.

someone left a comment with this quote from brian eno, which i couldn’t let pass:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Brian Eno — A Year With Swollen Appendices, Faber and Faber | 1996

brainsparks: revival as loss of identity (tn#103), nostalgia theory (tn#19), glitched nostalgia (tn#34)

🖼️ab.solve

this is one of the coolest things that touched me in a long time. i love the mix of ai-generated images in the real world (already playing with the flaws of ai if i must say —the weird typography for instance). the mix of hair and melting paint created a new image in my head, which i have never seen before. it took me on a such a trip. this wordplay on absolving and absorbing (see lyrics). is the infiltrated liquid technology invading our art and, therefore, ourselves?

Sponging all the bullshit
Beamed by this city
It became hard to hear from my heart

When I realised it wasn't too late yet
By the time that I talked, it was

with these lyrics, it reminded me of jaloo’s song essa cidade vai me matar (this city will kill me (tn#144). 9 years ago i made a playlist called urbifilia, about the love for the city, and now i’m picking up this kind urbiphobia, or aversion to the big city.

brainsparks: ai, engines for the imagination (tn#85), a blurry jpeg of the web (tn#111), [this tech is] killing me (tn#113)

📺heaven knows

i was not too familiar with pinkpantheress, but her new album, heaven knows, got me surprisingly hooked on it. The y2k nostalgia is real and super well done and i love the unserious vibe while delivering top-notch music.

💿la_original.mp3

my ultraprocessed guilty pleasure of the moment, the argentinian bombshell, emilia. her new album’s name is .mp3, and all the y2k aesthetics and sounds are perfectly engineered to get you hooked. i love that even the mp3 “degraded media” aspects are channeled here.

🗣️speak-o-phone

the radio novelo apresenta podcast (one of my favorite brazilian podcasts) introduced me weeks ago to a kind of media i was not aware existed: people could send miniature recorded discs by mail. and there are people collecting these voices from the past, sharing mundane things from that time, between 1920s-1940s. in this post from national geographic you can listen to bunch of them, and it’s so precious to be able to peek into such intimate moments from the past.

brainsparks: personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132), i feel love (tn#15)

👅oralitura

Orature: A portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o to denote imaginative works of the oral tradition usually referred to as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.

talking with my timetraveler friend gustavo, he casually dropped this word: orature (or its version in portuguese, which is even more magical, oralitura.) i asked for a pause, so i could take a moment to absorb that word and what it meant. thank you, gust!

🤖ai pin

10 years after the human-machine romance ‘her’, humane is launched. i’m perplexed by this launch, and i think that’s the only word i can use for now. i don’t have any smart wearables, because i don’t want to be more interrupted/distracted than i already am. but this feels new, it’s not a screen, it’s not a watch/glass/headband, plus it is refreshing to see something so different coming from a company that is not one of the big tech (even though one of their biggest shareholders is openai’s sam altman). so yeah… it also feels like a trap. where is my trust in tech? (tn#94)

in 2018, amy webb’s report said that that year marked the beginning of the end of the smartphone, and this is a clear example of how the smartphone can fragment itself into wearables and assistants all around us.

brainsparks: critic of technology (tn#121), how will AI change the world? (tn#99), ai’s ethical compass (tn#114), dismantling ai capitalism (tn#69)

💡best inventions of 2023

the year hasn’t even finished, but we already have a list of the 200 best inventions of the year (spoiler alert: humane’s ai pin is also there). from inclusivity and accessibility to sustainability and mobility, it’s worth clicking and checking out where companies are focusing their investment. some feel trivial and some feel quite world-changing.

🫀future creatives report

protein agency and d&ad released the future creatives report, investigating the current scenario, tensions and possible futures, focusing on creative talent, educational institutions and the creative industry. i love the visuals, and how they organized the analysis around tensions, and then ways to move forward.

Today, the creative industries are faced with a myriad of challenges in their pursuit of attracting the best emerging talent. From funding cuts to the de-prioritisation of creative education, a precarious post-pandemic economy, and an ongoing struggle towards diversity, equity and inclusion there are significant barriers to establishing a career as a new creative. Many creative teams are facing a crisis of confidence, with the mainstreaming of AI tools having the potential to devalue originality and craft in creative work.

🔭life trends 2024

talking about tensions, accenture’s 2024 life trends brought some interesting topics: “the harmony between people, tech and business is showing tensions, and society is in flux. five trends explore the decline of customer obsession, the influence of generative ai, the stagnation of creativity, the balance of tech benefits and burden, and people’s new life goals.” my favorite is the 4th trend: error 429, human request limit reached.

brainsparks: consultancy horror story (tn#144)

see you next week, humans 🫀✨

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